Retail Auto Parts Stores and Their House Brands

If you're on this website, you've surely been in a parts store. Have you ever wondered about how all those house brands work?

This is only pertaining to retail auto parts stores like Napa, AutoZone, O'Reilly, and Advance.

What are the House Brands?

All of these stores have their own "House Brands" or "Proprietary Brands" these are owned in full by the retailer and can range in quality greatly. Here's a list of the house brands we know for each retailer.

AutoZone

• Duralast

• Valucraft

• TomiHawk

• AutoKraft

• Femo

• Tackies

• AFO

Advance

• CarQuest

• DieHard

• TEQ

• DriveWorks

• & more

Napa

• NAPA

• Carlyle

• Adaptive One

O'Reilly

• Microgard

• MasterPro

• Precision

• Power Torque Tools

• Power Torque Engines

• Ultima

• OmniSpark

• Murray

• SuperStart

• Import Direct

• O'Reilly

• Pro X One

Who is actually manufacturing them?

That's the thing actually, it changes. House Brands are offered to keep prices low and ensure the retailer has an offering, but that is missing a few pieces of information.

Most of these brands are actually offered as a way for the retailer to control quality and inventory.

For some items, there is only so many manufacturers so it's pretty easy to pinpoint.

Suspension Parts

• Mevotech

• Federal Mogul

Cooling Parts (A/C Compressors, Radiators)

• Four Seasons

Batteries

• Clarios

• East Penn

• Exide

Filtration

• Mann + Hummel

• Mahle

• Bosch

• Donaldson Company Inc.

Why do retailers do this?

Let's take a simple serpentine belt for example, O'Reilly wants to stock the serpentine belt in all of their stores but unfortunately Manufaturer A that O'Reilly partnered with can't make enough to supply O'Reillys demand, this leads to O'Reilly asking Manufacturer B to make the order instead, but Manufacturer B can't make enough either. O'Reilly realizes that if they made their own brand and just ordered from several manufacturers, they could just put different manufacturers' serpentine belts in the same box and now every O'Reilly store has a MasterPro serpentine belt in stock.

This can work in your favor or against it; in some cases, you might be getting a cheap MasterPro belt that was actually made by Goodyear or Gates, but in some other cases, you might get it from Ronnie's Rubber company that only has one employee, and its not even Ronnie.

To their credit, almost all of these have an "economy-focused" brand alongside a "premium" brand, and they will typically use a good manufacturer for the "premium" brand, and then whoever they can find to do it cheapest for the "economy-focused" brand.

What do the manufacturers think?

You might think the manufacturers like Gates wouldn't be happy with their belt being put under a different label, but they actually don't care. They are instructed to remove their logo from being stamped or printed on the product, and they comply.

This is because Gates still makes money, think about it, they might loose some market share at the store, but they also made the belt they're loosing market share to. To Gates, they made money both ways, so they'll do it and keep doing it.

How to beat the house brand

There is basically no way to figure out what brand you actually got when you get a house brand, as most retailers have instructed them to remove all branding, and some are even instructed to change the product's colors to match the house brand.

Sometimes, however, they leave a mark on the product indicating who made it, sometimes the color isn't changed, and it actually has the manufacturer's signature color.

One of the best ways to tell is that the house brand almost always just copies the original manufacturer's part number. Just type your part number into Google, followed by "part number," and a lot of the time, the original manufacturer's part comes up. This isn't a 100% though, it just works a lot of the time.